James Patterson - Thriller - Stories to Keep You Up All Night

A small shaft rose before him at a 45-degree angle. He struggled out of his blood-soaked jacket, then removed his pack. He grasped the tiny ledges and maneuvered up the tube. Spasms reignited from thigh to back and he cried in silent anguish. He pressed his back hard against the rock, the cool radiating through his shirt, which offered some respite from the fever.

Then pressed on.

The claustrophobic sense of being trapped became unavoidable. His progress was only a couple of inches at a time, his broad shoulders catching on the rock again and again.

Three minutes of mind-bending pain and contortions were needed to negotiate the narrowest spot. Once past, the passage wasn't much larger.

Finally, he found a ledge and reached daylight. Natural light illuminated ancient Tilok rock paintings. One painting was familiar. A hunter with an antlered crown.

The sign of the Spirit Walker.

One more ledge remained above him. He sucked in a breath and blindly grabbed hold, only to feel a crushing pain in the fingers of his right hand. Standing above him was a man wearing a mask with bulbous filters, gloved hands pointing a crossbow downward.

"I didn't think anyone could get up through there, until Jake did it day before yesterday," Mix said, his voice distant and muffled. The mask shook its head. "What you did is crazy, but maybe convenient. You're supposed to be down at your cabin getting arrested. I explained to the agents how you tried to kill me when I discovered your anthrax-manufacturing operation."

Kier fought both the pain in his fingers and his trapezius wound, which was slowly separating as he hung, fresh blood trickling down his back. He wanted to yank out his fingers and fight, but he saw the antlered crown on the rock wall and knew that his grandfather would wait. Damn the old man.

"I told them every man, woman and child in the country should be vaccinated against anthrax," Mix said, keeping his crossbow aimed. "A guy like me with no technical training could make anthrax in the basement. I told them anyone can do it, Arab, Jew, black or white. They thought I was nuts. Then I made it and mailed it to Congress and the media. The bureau still wouldn't listen. Oh, they interviewed me about terrorism. Sweated me. But I knew all their secrets. I told them I'd find the real anthrax killer. Now I'm delivering."

Mix pressed his weight more on Kier's hand, grinding it with his heel. The agony released a cold sweat from every pore in his body.

"Why'd you kill the boy?" Kier gasped. "Let's not play games."

"It started when? The couple…a year ago-"

"I couldn't help that. They broke into my cabin, where I stored the anthrax. They were going to die anyway. One whiff of that stuff and-" He made a throat-slitting gesture. "I decided a year ago to make you the anthrax killer. Then two days ago Jake came and rushed the program."

"We welcomed you-" Kier said.

"Jake saw the cabin. Mouthed off that it was a sacred area. I was going to shove him off the cliff. Strong bastard, though. I had to put an arrow in him. And I couldn't let that be discovered. So I remembered the guy in Lassen. The bureau believes you're the anthrax terrorist, but I knew that convincing them you killed Jake might be stretching it."

Kier fought the pain, begging his muscles for the strength.

"They're desperate for the anthrax terrorist, so I'm delivering." Mix chuckled. "Ex-renegade survivalist. Rebellious Indian. And you can come to the holy place." He laughed. "The Spirit Walker."

Mix pointed. "Cabin's right out there. I made your tracks. A trail straight here. Did you notice around your cabin? The bureau taught me footprints and all the forensics. Ironic, isn't it?" "The tribe will never believe it."

"There's anthrax hidden in your cellar at the summer cabin. After following my trail now, you've got it on you. If you hadn't seen me there at the camp, I might have just let you die of anthrax while under arrest."

But Kier knew he'd stopped short of all the anthrax. Even to his pain-fogged mind, it made sense. Raccoon followed Jake and Carmen into the camp and took Carmen. Mix killed Jake and then later came down to the camp from the cliff.

"Jessie," he choked out.

"FBI is getting a warrant to search the cellar of your cabin, if they haven't already."

"Lassen?" Kier said, even as his mind was sinking under the weight of terror for his family.

"Why would I murder some couple in Lassen? All that would bring is more cops. But we need to shut that senator up. People need closure. Raccoon will make a fine serial killer. The story of Raccoon, the serial killer, and Kier, the anthrax terrorist. Maybe I'll write a book." Mix went silent, aiming the crossbow at the base of Kier's neck. "I gotta finish you and get busy. Carmen and Raccoon are up here somewhere."

"Profit?" Kier breathed. "That the plan?"

"Book royalties. Some stock shares in the right vaccine company. But this isn't about that. It's about protecting this country when its leaders won't."

Kier couldn't talk anymore. The threat to his family became a hot knife in his mind. He closed his eyes and replaced the pain with an image of Jessie and his children. Then he gained strength from an image of his grandfather's face.

He sucked a deep breath and yanked his broken fingers from under the boot. But before he could do anything, a raging scream blared from several feet away.

Raccoon's massive frame flew at Mix.

Kier's left hand struck like a snake, his fingers wrapping around Mix's ankle and yanking the man down.

Mix fired the crossbow and Kier heard the bow string snap. Then he saw a spray of red from where the bolt sank into the base of Raccoon's neck.

Mix slammed against the cavern's painted wall, and fell into the hole with Kier. With his good hand, Kier pounced and ripped off the mask. Then he focused all his energy in the thumb of his ruined hand and rammed it into Mix's eye, going all the way through the cornea, the meniscus, and into the brain. Mix groaned and clamped his hands over the eye socket. His body began to shudder.

Carmen appeared, standing over Raccoon, screaming, trying to stop the blood. "No. Daddy, no." She was sobbing.

Raccoon took her hand as if he knew the blood would not be stopped.

"Stay with us," Kier said to his friend.

Mix's remaining eye went vacant and still and the body stopped twitching. He was dead. Kier crawled closer to Raccoon and gazed into the eyes of the man who'd saved his life. "You took that arrow for me."

"Spirit Walker," Raccoon said, using his free hand to take Kier's. "Carmen."

Kier watched Raccoon suck in a shallow breath, then the chest became still. He watched the Spirit leave his friend and struggled to raise his hand, wanting to call him back.

There were no words. Only anguish.

"My father's gone," Carmen said in a whisper. "The moment we got here he saw you were in danger. No time to say goodbye."

He wondered if Raccoon could see them from wherever he was.

Carmen went silent and simply stared at her father. He, too, said nothing. Finally, she asked, "How can you not be a Spirit

Walker?"

"I've decided," he said. "I am."

And he closed his eyes.

Sitting straight and strong by the reflecting pool, his grandfather nodded and smiled.

These days, to her family's great relief, Denise Hamilton stays home in Los Angeles and writes the Eve Diamond crime novels. But in the bad old days before she turned to fiction, Hamilton was a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and roamed the globe, filing dispatches from Asia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the former USSR.

In 1993, Hamilton was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach journalism in Macedonia. The Bosnian war was in full swing, and she went with the full knowledge that if the fighting spread to her part of the Balkans, she'd go overnight from college professor to war correspondent. But Macedonia never blew up and Hamilton widely toured the South Balkans and fell in love with the small, quirky nation of Albania, which at that time was just emerging from fifty years of communist isolation. As Hamilton writes in At the Drop of a Hat, there were few ways in and out of Albania but she managed to hitchhike into Tirana with some Albanian journalists she met at a conference on beautiful Lake Ohrid, at the Macedonia-Albania border.